Chapter 32
DECLAN
Jace woke up with Tiny’s paw on his ribs and my hand on the back of his neck.
For a few seconds, he didn’t move. His breathing changed first, that slow shift from sleep to awareness, then his fingers flexed against the sheet.
His hair was wrecked, flattened on one side, sticking up on the other.
There was a pillow crease along his cheek and a faint frown between his brows like even unconsciousness had been mildly irritating.
Tiny snored directly into his stomach.
Jace opened one eye. Looked down.
“Your dog is committing a felony.”
I kept my voice low. “He missed you.”
“He saw me eight hours ago.”
“Long night for him.”
“It was a long night for all of us. I didn’t climb onto his organs.”
Tiny twitched in his sleep, paw pressing harder.
Jace wheezed. “Declan.”
I slid my arm around Tiny’s chest and tried to shift him. He became liquid, somehow tripling in weight.
“Tiny,” I said.
The dog opened his eyes, gave me the exhausted look of a man being asked to work on his day off, and placed his chin more firmly on Jace.
Jace stared at the ceiling. “This is how I die. Not a dirty hit. Not a skate blade. Crushed in bed by a codependent cow.”
I laughed into his shoulder.
He turned his head toward me, and for one brief second the morning stayed soft.
No rink. No Olivia’s absence pressing against the walls.
No Vanessa, no Roman, no management, no policies, no headlines waiting in the dark.
Just Jace in my bed, warm and rumpled, looking at me like he’d forgotten to put anything between his face and what he felt.
Then he smiled, small and sleepy.
It hit me harder than waking up alone ever had.
“Coffee?” I asked.
“Yes. Immediately. Before I start saying things with consequences.”
“You already do that without coffee.”
“Imagine the danger level uncaffeinated.”
Getting out of bed required negotiating with Tiny, who protested with a groan that sounded too human to be ignored. Jace sat up slowly, rubbing both hands over his face, then stopped halfway like he’d lost the thread of the movement. His gaze flicked around the room once.
I saw the moment reality came back.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. It slipped in through the ordinary things. His clothes on the floor. My shirt half under the dresser. The bedroom door open because Tiny had forced his way in sometime before dawn. The quiet house where my wife no longer was.
Jace swallowed and reached for his phone on the nightstand.
Then he stopped himself.
I watched his thumb hover over the screen.
He put it back down, face tight with effort. “No scrolling before food.”
“You decided that?”
“Therapist suggested it. Roman yelled it. You would agree with it. Annoying coalition.”
“Good call.”
“Don’t praise me before coffee. I’ll get emotional and blame dehydration.”
I leaned over and kissed the side of his head.
He went quiet under it.
In the kitchen, he stood too close to me while I made coffee, not touching at first, just occupying the same narrow strip of floor as if distance had become an insult.
Tiny parked himself between our legs and made breakfast preparation nearly impossible.
Twice I had to step around his massive head.
Once Jace bumped into me reaching for mugs and muttered, “Sorry,” though there was nothing sorry in the way his hand stayed at my waist for two seconds too long.
I made eggs. Toast. Cut up oranges because Jace found them in the fridge and held them up like a discovery.
“Tiny gets one,” he said.
“Tiny gets half of one.”
“He’s emotionally fragile.”
“He’s one hundred and sixty pounds.”
“Feelings don’t scale by weight.”
Tiny drooled on the floor.
Jace looked down. “See? Devastated.”
We ate at the kitchen island. Jace sat with one foot hooked on the rung of the stool, knee moving in a restless rhythm that sped up whenever he checked the time and slowed whenever he took a bite.
He forgot his fork twice. He fed Tiny a piece of egg when he thought I wasn’t looking.
Tiny accepted it like a sacred offering.
I didn’t correct him.
I wanted a thousand mornings like that.
The thought landed with such force that I set my coffee down before I dropped it.
Jace noticed. He always noticed more than people gave him credit for, even when half his attention was being dragged in five directions.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was not a nothing face.”
“I was thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
“About groceries.”
His expression changed immediately.
The joke fell out of his hands.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
He looked down at his plate, then at Tiny, then back at me. “I want that so badly it’s embarrassing.”
“It isn’t.”
“It kind of is. I play in front of twenty thousand people for a living, and apparently my big fantasy is buying cereal with you and arguing over toilet paper brands.”
“We’d argue over more than that.”
“Obviously. You probably buy responsible bread.”
“I buy normal bread.”
“You buy bread with visible seeds.”
“It’s good.”
“It looks like it was made during a punishment.”
I smiled, but it didn’t hold for long. Neither did his.
The room didn’t change, but the air did. We both felt it. The morning couldn’t stay suspended forever.
Jace pushed eggs around his plate. “We can’t keep doing it like this.”
“No.”
He nodded once, too fast, then made himself take a breath. “Olivia knows there’s someone. Vanessa knows enough to hate me properly. Roman knows enough to watch me like I’m a loose grenade. The only people who don’t know are the ones who can actually destroy us professionally.”
“That’s the part we have to handle carefully.”
He rubbed at his jaw, stubble rasping under his fingers. “Carefully meaning what? We pretend until we get caught? We confess to ownership and hope they appreciate honesty? I’m not being sarcastic. I genuinely don’t know the adult sequence here.”
“Neither do I,” I said.
That admission cost more than I expected.
Jace looked at me. “You always know the sequence.”
“No. I know systems. This isn’t one I can run by instinct.”
He nodded again, slower this time. “Because you’re my coach.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s not a detail. That’s the whole land mine.”
I took a drink of coffee I didn’t want. “If we go to the wrong person first, it becomes a personnel issue before we understand our options.”
“If we go to no one, it becomes a scandal when someone else notices.”
“Exactly.”
“Roman?” he asked, but I heard the doubt in it before he finished the name.
I shook my head. “I trust Roman with your life. I don’t think he’s the first person for this.”
Jace’s mouth pressed together, but he didn’t argue. “He’d react as my friend.”
“He should. That’s his place.”
“He’d want to protect me, then threaten you, then threaten anyone who might threaten me. Possibly in that order. Possibly all at once.”
“He’s too close to it.”
“Yeah.” Jace exhaled through his nose. “And if Rachel talks to him because Olivia needs someone who knows divorce and he has to sit there with his mouth shut, that’s already enough. I don’t want to make him our strategy department.”
I watched him, the effort in him to think beyond panic, beyond impulse. It wasn’t smooth. His fingers tapped the countertop. His gaze kept jumping to the window, the stove, his phone, my hands. But he stayed with the conversation.
“Tessa,” I said.
He stilled for half a beat.
Then he looked at me. “Yeah.”
“She understands the organization.”
“She understands media.”
“She knows what ownership reacts to.”
“She knows where bodies are buried,” Jace said. “Probably literally, with this team.”
“She separates logistics from emotion.”
“She also terrifies me a little.”
“She terrifies most competent people.”
Jace reached for his coffee, missed by an inch, corrected, and held the mug in both hands. “Do we tell her everything?”
“We tell her enough to get real advice. Not details she doesn’t need.”
“Serious relationship. Timing. Olivia knows. Vanessa knows. Roman suspects or knows?”
“Roman knows enough. We don’t use his name unless we have to.”
“Okay.” He swallowed. “And we don’t make her responsible for fixing it.”
“No.”
“We ask for advice.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me over the rim of his mug. “Today?”
“If we wait, we’ll invent reasons not to.”
“That sounds like me.”
“It sounds like both of us.”
His mouth twitched, then faded. “Okay. Today.”
I sent Tessa a message after breakfast.
Need a private conversation today. Sensitive. Not urgent in the public sense, but important.
Her reply came nine minutes later.
My office. Two thirty. Use the staff corridor. Both of you.
Jace stared at the message on my phone.
“Both of you,” he said.
“She knew that much.”
“Or she’s a witch.”
“She’s Tessa.”
“Same category.”
The hours between breakfast and the meeting stretched strangely.
Jace showered in my bathroom and came out wearing yesterday’s clothes with my hoodie over them because he claimed his shirt had “developed an attitude.” I didn’t ask.
He helped me clean the kitchen, badly but earnestly.
He forgot the cabinet where the plates went, opened three wrong ones, then got frustrated enough that I took the plate from his hand and pointed without comment.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
“Yeah.”
“I know where plates live in my own apartment.”
“I didn’t say otherwise.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know.”
He leaned against the counter for a second, eyes closed, collecting himself. Then he finished wiping the island.
That was the shape of loving him in daylight. Not fixing. Not managing him into someone easier. Just noticing where the edge was and not making him bleed on it.
We drove separately.
I hated that.
He left first, after checking the street twice and kissing me once in the side entry like he meant to make it last the whole day. I gave him ten minutes before I left. By the time I reached the arena, my hands were steady on the wheel and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a stone.